According to Andy Warhol, everyone gets 15 minutes of fame. If you’re a security consultant, maybe that 15 minutes is the chance you get, face to face with the CEO of your customer, to convince them to focus on security.

The other day I found myself in conversation with a couple of senior execs from a large and well-known security vendor. During the discussion, they made the point that oftentimes a security health check or investigation means presenting bad news. The CISO is not always going to be overjoyed by what you have to report, so you need to present your conclusions direct to the decision maker.

So, this was the challenge – how are you going to get the CEO’s attention and a commitment to action, all in just 15 minutes? Clearly, there’s no use talking about operational security – that’s the CISO’s patch. So, I mused, frame the discussion in terms of Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC). Most organisations of any size are now quite adept at security compliance. Faced with a plethora of legislation, regulation and contract schedules and armed with a bewildering array of control frameworks and certification schemes, IT security teams spend most of their time looking backwards at what already happened. Beyond that, the Business grants authority to the CISO and his team to implement sufficient controls to enforce the corporate IT security policy. Governance is about monitoring how that decision-making process is working. Finally, the real objective looking forward should be to deploy adequate security to meet the business risk. That ought to be something the CEO cares about.

OK, so now we have a context, but what are the big issues in security for the business? I came up with a Top 3 (you may well disagree):

Consumerisation: Like it or not, staff are going to use their own devices (smart phones, tablets, home computers) in the course of their work. Of course, these devices are outside the control of the IT department, so how do you enforce security policies? What happens if the device is lost? Can you do a remote wipe (which will include the owner’s data as well as the company data)? This loss of control of physical assets and their configuration provides a toehold in the network for an attacker.

Advanced Persistent Threats: The business may find itself under attack from an APT, armed with a wide range of skills and resources and focused on a long-term (months or even years) objective. Even if the IT Security team detects ATP activity, this may only be a fleeting glimpse of what’s actually happening The business may well have no idea why it is being targetted. All the while, the APT will be syphoning off vast amounts of data, maybe sensitive business information, maybe intellectual property, but also maybe personal information belonging to the business’s clients or employees.

Cloud Services: I wrote in a previously post about the threats to security governance posed by cloud services. In many organisations, business units are adopting cloud services without the advice and support of their IT security specialists. The resulting agreements often provide little or no oversight as to how the provider will assure the security of critical or sensitive data and can place the business’ legal and/or regulatory compliance status in jeopardy.

All of these conspire to present a real and growing threat to the personal and sensitive information, stored by virtually every organisation these days. But, how to persuade the CEO that these threats are real? The challenge is to come up with a set of “world-class” questions – they don’t require an answer at the time, rather they should make our CEO reflect on what matters to the long-term health of the business. By coincidence, fellow IBMer Marc van Zadelhoff recently described his set of questions for the CISO in a blog post for the IBM Institute of Advanced Security. His candidate questions are rather more technical than what I had in mind, but that really reflects the dilemma of how to engage with the Business at a senior level. So, I thought about it for a while and this is what I came up with:

Where is your data stored right now? Can you account for every copy? If you’ve entrusted data to a 3rd party, are you sure you can get it back if you end the service? Are you sure they’ll delete it when you tell them?

Can you be sure that your sensitive data isn’t being exfiltrated by an attacker? If it was happening, would you know?

If the worst were to happen and you become the target for a large-scale, highly public data breach, do you have a credible, tested crisis plan for dealing with it? Can you withstand the reputational damage while you execute your plan?

So, that’s my list, all related to the need to protect critical and sensitive data. How would your CEO answer?